The Game of Hell. (1912)

Editorial from the February 1912 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fall of the Caillaux Ministry through the disclosures of the Morocco scandal is but another lesson in the sordid nature of our masters’ diplomacy. Here in England the same rotten mess is being made, and even the “Daily News,” Liberal though it is, calls for the resignation of Sir Edward Grey. What childish innocence! Just as if one man, and not the whole Liberal party, is to blame. Just as if every Liberal Minister, from the days of Palmerston’s intrigues with Russia, has not been the same. From the Crimea War to Majuba Hill the same old game was played.

Behind it all lurk the figures of the financial kings of England (or of capitalism), the men who come to the rescue of Governments with their money bags, the men who supply the party funds. Mr. Rothschild loaned Gladstone’s Government, millions at 15 per cent. interest to finance the Suez Canal and other Egyptian ventures ; he thereupon was made Lord Rothschild and Gladstone made war upon a people “rightly struggling to be free,” because they didn’t pay the interest quickly enough.

Russia has been the scene of greater wholesale murder for the past century than perhaps any other European country. That does not prevent our Liberal Government from making secret alliances, and welcoming the bloody Czar of Russia. Now a so-called return Parliamentary visit is being made to Russia, but the swindle is already seen. For instead of a purely Parliamentary deputation, there are representatives of all the great financial interests likely to be concerned in the promoting and building of a trans-Persian railway. Behind all the treaties —"to promote better relations" — there is merely the profit grinding commercialism of the Liberal and Tory capitalist.

As we prophesied in our December issue, Persia is to be the ”happy hunting ground” of English and Russian capitalists, and every obstacle to its annexation is cast aside—hence Mr. Shuster's dismissal. The speedy influx of capital in search of plunder recalls the building of the Cape to Cairo Railway that followed the arrival of Rhodes and his fellow buccaneers in South Africa.